It’s January 8, It’s 8 Degrees Out — It’s All Good. Right?

It’s not that I want to eat soup for every meal, but I feel like when it’s cold out and I spend the whole weekend in yoga pants, I feel like I need to be cooking soup all day long. But that would be too much soup.

Here’s our game plan for the week instead:

Sunday: Roasted chicken, roasted veggies. For the chicken, my vague recipe: chop a bunch of garlic, mix it in a small bowl with some olive oil, some lemon juice, some white wine, some salt & pepper, some herbs — basil is nice, but anything will do. Pull back the chicken skin wherever you can get access and grab a handful of the garlic mixture and shove it in — the goal is to rub it between the skin and the meat as much as you can. I like to also cut a lemon and an onion in half and put them in the cavity of the chicken — not sure if it does anything taste-wise, but it makes the house smell nice. Then I put it in the oven at about 400 degrees for an hour or an hour and a half — I just keep checking it with my thermometer until it’s done.

For the roasted veggies, I’m thinking brussels sprouts (with some olive oil and salt & pepper, then in that same oven for 20 – 30 minutes) and maybe butternut squash and kale. I usually just roast b’nut squash on its own, but in my attempt to try out all the recipes in my chosen cookbook (The Pioneer Woman Cooks Dinnertime), I’ll give this version a try instead. Plus, we have kale. Because I always buy it without a plan.

Tuesday: Fish tacos. Our fish taco recipe is as rigid as the roasted chicken recipe (see Sunday…). We’ll cook some fish (mahi mahi or cod) either by grilling it or baking in the oven — depends on the weather. We’ll spice it first with some ancho chile powder, salt, garlic, and cumin. When it’s cooked, we’ll crumble it and put it in corn tortillas, and then top with random stuff. Here’s what we sometimes use: shredded cabbage, chopped red onion, guacamole, diced tomatoes, thin-sliced bell pepper, pickled jalapeños, sour cream, cheese, black beans, salsa. We won’t use all this, but as much of it as we can scrape up. I’ll fill my taco shells way too full and make a terrible mess, requiring a big plate and a fork. Phil will make tacos with engineer-type precision with the exact right amount of cheese shreds on each. Both will be yummy.

Thursday: Tuscan Chicken Spaghetti Squash — I’ll make this earlier in the week so we just have to pop it in the oven and heat it for a bit on Thursday night. We’ll use chicken left over from our roasted chicken on Sunday!

Friday: Since January brings out my stay-at-homeness even more than other months, I’m inclined to want to cook on weekends instead of venture out into the cold and muck to a restaurant. But I still want Friday night food. So we’ll do some homemade chicken wings, oven fries, and coleslaw. No real recipes to share here — We season the wings and put them on a rack over a big roasting pan (so they can crisp all the way around) and bake them on about 400 until they seem done, then we toss them with a sauce — I vote for Franks’ Red Hot, and Phil is a fan of one of the five random bottles of barbecue sauce we always seem to have in the door of the fridge.

Saturday: Please see Friday’s admission of extreme introversion, and recognize that this is the time of year when I attempt homemade sushi. We’re going for it tonight. Our sushi approach is similar to our fish taco approach — Let’s find good stuff in the fridge and add it in — but the rice is the thing with making sushi… And this blog post is one that I looked at the first few times I tried to make it at home. So that’s it — veggies, maybe some fish, definitely some Sriracha mayo, and yumminess.

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